{"id":302026,"date":"2025-10-14T12:39:58","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T12:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/exclusive-meet-darkest-dungeon-iis-new-character-the-runaway\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T12:39:58","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T12:39:58","slug":"exclusive-meet-darkest-dungeon-iis-new-character-the-runaway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/exclusive-meet-darkest-dungeon-iis-new-character-the-runaway\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Meet Darkest Dungeon II’s New Character The Runaway"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Publisher:<\/b> Red Hook Studios <\/div>\n
Developer:<\/b> Red Hook Studios <\/div>\n
Platform:<\/b> PC <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p>\n

The world is at its end. Wild accelerationist cults set fire to the cities. Pastoral baronies become insatiable hungering mouths upon mouths. Only your ragtag band of guilt-ridden adventurers can kindle a glimmer of hope to stop the ancient, encroaching evil. With a host of new terrors to overcome, a massive shift to a run-based roguelike structure, and a bold new character, the cosmic aberrations of Darkest Dungeon are poised to serve up fresh challenges and horrors with this scintillating sequel from Red Hook Studios.<\/em><\/p>\n

[Editor’s Note: This article also appears in Game Informer Issue 338]<\/em><\/p>\n

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Darkest Dungeon 2 isn\u2019t content to live in the shadow of the hamlet from the first game. Instead of continuing with the town-building aspects and dungeon crawling of the original game, Darkest Dungeon 2 puts players on a doomed caravan ride into cursed biomes crawling with unbridled decadence. With the stakes as high as the world coming to an end, environments that were hanging on by a thread have spiraled into madness, embracing the worst elements of themselves that were always hidden away. As you ride through the world with a hand-picked crew of adventurers, death and despair are always lurking right around the corner. The same great turn-based combat and stylish gothic look of the first game return, but with constant decisions to make around every corner of each run.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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That said, don\u2019t fear too much \u2013 you acquire hope (an in-game currency) from all of your runs, which you can use to unlock various components to show up in subsequent runs, new characters, skills for your caravan, and even permanent boosts. So even as all is lost \u2013 and it will be, frequently \u2013 you venture toward the final destination with some degree of progress. A successful run currently looks like it will take around four hours, so it\u2019s important to reiterate that players unlock all kinds of special things at the account level based on each journey.<\/p>\n

Instead of maneuvering from tile to tile on a dungeon map, the player instead navigates through a map filled with various encounters, destinations, and boss battles. If you\u2019re concerned that the roguelike nature of the game means there isn\u2019t a cohesive narrative or a canonical ending, fear not, there is an actual ending in the final version of the game. While much of the cast returns for the adventurers, some skills have been changed, edited, or removed to facilitate the new game environment. In addition, characters have more skills to pick from, allowing players to create more diverse and interesting teams.<\/p>\n

While the choice to stop at a hospital to heal rather than opt-in to a deadly boss fight may seem obvious, there are other foibles at work here to keep you stressed as you fight for safety and sanity. As in the first game, the concept of the torch remains an essential element. Unlike the first game, the light is critical to continuing the journey, and if it goes out, you\u2019re going to die quickly. To keep things lit, you must continue to battle enemies and reduce their numbers from the land. But making time to stop at other checkpoints where you can trade with the hoarder, discover \u00advaluable curios at an academic study, or just help random survivors huddled around a wagon is also important.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dark here is not sustainable,\u201d says Red Hook co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t mean that in a fun way. Narratively and from a gameplay standpoint, it\u2019s not sustainable. If you run your torch to the ground, just because of what the torch means, this time, it\u2019s not just a literal measure of how much light there is. Allegorically, it\u2019s the hope for the future that you\u2019re sort of carrying on your back. And so if it goes out, it\u2019s kind of game over. You get one last shot. We give you a really tough encounter; the cult catches up to you and jumps you, and if you can fight them back, we give you a little bit more gas to try to get ahead and hopefully restore it somehow. But it doesn\u2019t fill the same role as it did.\u201d<\/p>\n

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If all you do on the journey is try to seek out non-combat nodes on the map, you\u2019ll end up underpowered and crushed by the weight of darkness. However, try to take on too much or some dangerous high-reward boss nodes, and you may find your adventure ending abruptly. Finding a balance and knowing when to step outside your comfort zone for some advanced risk-taking is what it\u2019s all about.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that the big zone bosses are optional here (with the exception of the final boss) so if you find yourself completely decimated wandering through an area, it\u2019s possible to opt-out of the traditional \u201carea boss\u201d and just push on to the next zone. Of course, this will leave you missing out on the associated treasures, so the next area will be a tougher endeavor.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really a power curve thing,\u201d says co-founder and design director Tyler \u00adSigman. \u201cSo, game design-wise, it\u2019s been an interesting challenge. If you avoid every fight, you can avoid the bosses and just try to stay safe, [but] you won\u2019t be powerful enough to kill the [final] boss. As you fight, you earn hero upgrade points which are spent to upgrade skills. That\u2019s really vital. Basically, if you haven\u2019t upgraded any skills, by the time you get to the end boss, you\u2019re just not going to be up for it. And so essentially, we try to give you some control over your own power curve, of how many challenges you want.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you finish each area, you choose between two different areas for the next leg of the journey. Since the game is biome-based, with each area having special inhabitants, you can create a game plan early on \u2013 but don\u2019t expect anything to be easy. For instance, the inhabitants of the city are quite resilient to fire damage, so it\u2019s probably a bad idea to include the Runaway in your crew if you plan to head into the city. However, each area contains modifiers that are different every run, so you must be ready for anything.<\/p>\n

Even if you plan to head to the farmlands, maybe the modifier on your 10th run will have something horrible there, so you\u2019re tempted to select the other biome instead, even if it is a less than ideal pick for your team composition. Random and incredibly dangerous occurrences that players may remember from the first game, like the Shambler and the Collector, return in some form.<\/p>\n

Permadeath is back. If someone reaches the death state, they\u2019re gone for good. Since you can\u2019t easily head back to the hamlet to replenish your team like you could in the first game, you, instead, have to rely on picking up one new character at an inn. This character may not be tailored to your group at all, but sometimes you have to work with what you have available. This pickup is a one-and-done deal as well, so it\u2019s all you get. If someone dies again, you have to struggle along with whatever you have.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t have engagement and emotional attachment without tension and fear of loss. So, if we coddle you and make sure that nothing bad will ever happen to you, you\u2019re not going to feel that same level of excitement,\u201d Bourassa explains. \u201cLike when your guy survives a death\u2019s door roll or something because you\u2019re not worried. You know, if he dies, he dies. We\u2019re always trying to thread that or walk that line, where what you have invested in could be taken away because that\u2019s really the only way you can play poker, right? You have to be afraid of losing your money. That\u2019s why people play, because the excitement is high when you win, and it\u2019s terrifying when you\u2019re kind of on the ropes. To recreate that experience, we have to make sure that the player knows that we are willing to take their chips.\u201d<\/p>\n

To further engagement with your party members, Red Hook also promises greater insight into the characters you take along for each run, with narrative elements that delve into their backstories and relationships along the way.<\/p>\n

And the changes don\u2019t stop there. Another aspect that has changed significantly is healing. Players can no longer leave one enemy alive and heal up to full \u2013 something that had rife potential for abuse in the original title. Instead, players must heal up outside of combat, which also facilitates group compositions that probably wouldn\u2019t be optimal in the original. Don\u2019t want to bring a healer along? No problem, live the dream and make that quad-DPS stack.<\/p>\n

While early access will allow Red Hook \u00adStudios to tune things, the current plan isn\u2019t to have different difficulty settings like the first game. Instead, in typical roguelike fashion, special modifiers and alterations called mutators let players to ratchet up the challenge if they\u2019re looking to whet their appetite for adversity. There\u2019s also a good possibility that other roguelike staples, like daily run seeds where you can compare your performance against your friends and the greater playerbase, are also on deck for implementation.<\/p>\n

Our next journey into madness probably won\u2019t be fully completed for a bit, with early access for Darkest Dungeon 2 slated to arrive this year. After Darkest Dungeon\u2019s PC launch, it eventually made its way to console, which we\u2019re hoping happens here as well, but nothing has been confirmed. Here\u2019s hoping it reaches as many gamers as possible because this is one time that we can\u2019t wait for the impending end of the world.<\/p>\n

The Runaway<\/h2>\n

Darkest Dungeon 2 will hit early access with one new character, the Runaway. Like other characters in our merry band of misfits, the Runaway comes from a checkered past. While we don\u2019t know the specifics of her sins yet, the Runaway\u2019s kit embraces fire, so we can almost certainly assume she did something awful with the element of embers. Fire is a new damage-over-time component in Darkest Dungeon 2, joining its friends bleed and blight (poison).<\/p>\n

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Eventually, the new character\u2019s look was just right. \u201cVisually I thought it\u2019d be neat to have this sort of younger woman with a giant backpack and hunched over; we pulled a little bit from Newt from Aliens, obviously more grown-up,\u201d says Red Hook co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa. \u201cOne of my directions to our animator was to channel a sort of a \u2018bat girl\u2019 kind of vibe. So, she\u2019s got this cape, and some of the animations are really fluid where it flares out behind her, and she can retreat to stealth and hide.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u00a0took time for the team to iterate on their ideas for the Runaway, but they liked how well she fit into the fiction.\u00a0 \u201cWe just felt creatively she fit the world. She was kind of an extension of the game fiction as a whole, and what better character to debut as a new class than someone who\u2019s intrinsically connected to the meta-\u00adnarrative of the game itself? We could have done a wandering badass with two handguns or something, but it felt a little rote. So mechanically, we added a new DoT [damage-over-time]; we have fire and burn damage in Darkest Dungeon, too. And we needed an evangelist for that mechanic the same way the plague doctor kind of works for poison or blight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went through a couple of ideas. I think it\u2019s easy, it\u2019s safe to add a badass, give it a cool weapon and a cool faceplate or something, and you\u2019re off to the races,\u201d Bourassa says. \u201cBut we kind of asked ourselves, \u2018What type of character would inhabit this world that\u2019s crumbling down and falling apart?\u2019 And it made sense that some kind of a furtive, scurrying, outwardly disadvantaged … a little bit like an agile Antiquarian in a sense, but highly proficient in combat. Thematically, it felt like someone who\u2019s picking through the rubble of the old world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Runaway is a survivor, a scavenger, and a scrapper. Exemplified by those aspects, she fits easily into lineups in multiple positions. However, she may be best at getting into the action hot and heavy and then using stealth to head back into the lineup to a safer area, perhaps moving a friend closer to the fray. The Runaway excels at disrupting foes, applying flames, and adjusting the flow and positioning of battle. Check out the entire Runaway skill lineup (right), and you can start planning on how to place her into your favorite Darkest Dungeon teams.<\/p>\n

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The Runaway likely won\u2019t be the only new face in Darkest Dungeon 2, either. \u201cWe\u2019re bringing one new character for early access launch, but it\u2019s not like we have decided only to make one new one, period,\u201d says Red Hook co-founder and design director Tyler Sigman. \u201cHopefully, if the game finds an audience as Darkest Dungeon did, then you know, DLC, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n